The Mandarins

by Simone de Beauvoir

‘Nudity begins with the face, and obscenity with the word,’

For Dubreuilh, a landscape, a stone, a colour, was a single human truth; things never moved him in memory or dream, or by the feelings they might arouse in him, but only by the meaning he detected in them.

Wealth always has something public about it, but the life of the poor is an intimate thing;

There was a time when he believed that happiness was one way of mastering the world, while actually it was closer to being a way of protecting yourself against it.